The evil eye is a widespread cross-cultural superstition that can be traced back for thousands of years. It is called “mal de ojo” in Spain and Latin America, “malocchio” in Italy, and “ayin hara” in Hebrew, and it is referenced in the Talmud. The construct centers around the belief that you should not show off your good fortune lest you incite the envy of someone with the evil eye, who might then curse you. To this day, it is common for Jews to invoke the Yiddish expression “kein eine hora” (literally “no evil eye”) whenever saying something positive, as a vestige of apotropaic magic (believed to protect against evil), akin to knocking on wood.

The term “apikoros”, which is derived from the name of the Greek philosopher Epicurus, refers to a Jew who is lax in religious observance or belief. Here is what Epicurus had to say about death: "Accustom yourself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply awareness, and death is the privation of all awareness; therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life an unlimited time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For life has no terror; for those who thoroughly apprehend that there are no terrors for them in ceasing to live. Foolish, therefore, is the person who says that he fears death, not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect. Whatever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer. But in the world, at one time people shun death as the greatest of all evils, and at another time choose it as a respite from the evils in life. The wise person does not deprecate life nor does he fear the cessation of life. The thought of life is no offense to him, nor is the cessation of life regarded as an evil. And even as people choose of food not merely and simply the larger portion, but the more pleasant, so the wise seek to enjoy the time which is most pleasant and not merely that which is longest."

Lyrics

My father never knew his brother Sam.
He died when he was only 2 years old
from what was called the summer complaint,
when milk would spoil without refrigeration.

His mother, with her Old World superstitions,
believed that she had shown too much affection.
To avert the evil eye, she vowed that she would never
kiss my father ‘til the day that he was married.

My grandmother died five years before his wedding,
so my father never knew his mother’s kiss.
And I think he always felt a little awkward
with physical displays of affection.

My father had a cardiac arrest
in synagogue on Sabbath while he prayed
in mourning for his younger sister Syl,
who had died a few days earlier that week.

To die in shul on Shabbos saying Kaddish
is said to be the privilege of the righteous,
but this Talmudic notion gave cold comfort
to a skeptic apikoros such as me.

I felt the need to see my father’s body
in order to confirm that he was dead.
As Charlotte Brontë wrote, “To see and know the worst
is to take from Fear her main advantage.

I wandered down the mortuary corridor
to the room where he was lying on a table.
My incongruous impression when I saw him
was, “What a handsome guy, he even looks good dead.”

My Dad had deep-set ice-blue eyes, sculpted nose and lips,
wavy hair and Hollywood-fine features.
He looked like he could have been the love child
of Ralph Bellamy and Harrison Ford.

Religious Jews do not embalm their dead.
They say man was created in God’s image,
and doing so would be a desecration,
so they refrigerate the body until burial.

And now had come the time to leave my father.
I bent down to bestow a final kiss.
My lips were surprised by his forehead,
It was cool and refreshing to their touch.

His death was unexpected and abrupt.
I never had a chance to say goodbye.
I didn’t get to tell him that I loved him,
I just assume he knew it nonetheless.

My father had a full and happy life,
I don’t think it was missing very much.
Just a kiss that never came from his mother
and a kiss that came too late from his son.